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One in three hard drives returned to Seagate for repair is "actually in perfect working order", says Guy Weavers, director of EMEA field applications engineering at Seagate. So customers are wrongly blaming the drive when their PC breaks down. This means that they lose data, time and maybe money, by sending it back to the Seagate factory. Time and money is lost down the line by Seagate resellers too.

According to research conducted by Seagate the cost to resellers of returns of healthy drives ranges from €28 per drive to as much as €122 for same-day response.

Weavers says the system error which prompted a return "may have been caused by a virus, a loose connector, a simple power spike or some other problem not related to the hard drive".

So how to avoid wrong diagnosis? Seagate has a handy, free set of vendor-generic diagnostic software, called SeaTools. According to the company, customers who use SeaTools when diagnosing a system issue report that the drive is not at fault 45 per cent of the time: 37 per cent report that the operating system is to blame.

This week it launched a campaign to get customers in EMEA to get this software - and use it. SeaTools is available for download here. There are also CD and enterprise versions. ®